Resize (tool) windows with keyboard

Since IntelliJ IDEA is so much loved by keyboard addicts, here is a tiny yet helpful feature introduced in version 9.0.2: you can change size of a tool window by means of your keyboard.

Say, you’re doing “find usages”, the tool window is popping up and it’s too small for you to comfortably look at the usages tree. Now you don’t have to grab a mouse to stretch it up, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Up (Meta-Shift-Up for Mac users) and your tool window is getting bigger.

So, if you need to resize a tool window: focus it (by Alt-number or Ctrl-Tab) and then use Ctrl-Shift plus an arrow key that points to the direction you want.

You can also use these arrow shortcuts to resize dialogs and actually any window that IntelliJ IDEA shows. Say, you opened the project structure dialog and it’s too narrow for you. Use Ctrl-Shift-Right and Ctrl-Shift-Down to make it bigger.

Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down is already mapped to the (much more useful) “Move statements Up/Down”. Veteran IntelliJ users (like me) probably use Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down a lot to rearrange statements.
You might want to change the keyboard shortcuts for this new feature to something else…
What do you say about using the numpad arrows instead? E.g.: Ctrl+Numpad 4/6/2/8

This is great, i hate reaching for the mouse.
@Cristian, I think the use case is for when focus is given to a-non editor window. Those shortcuts wont work if you aren’t in the editor. If you are in the editor window, the first thing you would do is select the tab first (CTRL+TAB or ALT+number), then use those keys to resize. But of course I agree that consideration should be given so they dont accidentally remove functionality from these tabs by way of clashing shortcuts.
Should give the EAP build a try to see how functional this is in practice, whether this will lead to accidentally moving statements.